1. Field of the invention.
The present invention relates to graphic design and more particularly to a method of preparing color separated fonts for transfer to a commercial art layout containing font characters to be printed in color.
In preparing camera ready advertising layouts, or the like, containing characters of a font to be printed in color it has been the practice to prepare overlays for the supplemental components of each font character, to be printed in color, by hand cutting a peel-away section of film to leave only that portion of the film on the transparent backing sheet for photoengraving and printing the colors of the respective characters. Obviously, this is a time consuming task requiring considerable skill on the part of the artist in making the color separation overlay so that one or more color plates will register with the respective characters.
2. Description of the prior art.
It is well known in graphic carts to use commercial dry transfer sheets containing characters of the alphabet to form cuts or headings on artwork ready for photoengraving or photography. One advantage of the dry transfer sheets is that the spacing between the characters, both linear and vertically with resepct to a reference line, may be adjusted by the artist to achieve balance or a desired effect, however, as mentioned above, if the characters are to be printed in color, it has heretofor been necessary, to obtain color registration, to manually cut or form overlay sheets of the supplemental component of each character to be printed in color. Since this procedure is a time consuming and tedious task, the characters to be printed in one or more colors is generally limited to titles, headings, or the like. One example of forming registerable color separations of the characters of type font is disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 2,105,555 which utilizes the matrix of a keyboard-operated type setting machine, or the like, in which the respective matrix contains the outline of the respective character and a color component so that a selected series of the matrix forms a word or words to be photographically reproduced for subsequent printing in color in a conventional manner. The principal disadvantage of the use of such matrix for color separation is that the spacing between the characters forming a word can not be adjusted to decrease the spacing between any two characters, to achieve a desired balance, less than the physical thickness of the matrix portions between two or more characters on juxtaposed matrixes.
It is also known to form a negative film strip of the characters of a font, the characters being arranged linearly on an elongated strip of film or on an endless circular strip of film, such as disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 3,821,770. The linear or circular strip of film may be used by either manually or by a photocomposing machine in successively exposing selected characters of the font on photographic paper to obtain the desired message and subsequent photoengraving. Such film strips increase the versatility of composing camera ready artwork, however, if the characters printed from the film strip are to be reproduced partially in color it becomes necessary to manually cut overlay strips containing the color separated components of the respective character.
This invention overcomes the above disadvantage by printing a font in linear form on a transparent sheet with each character of the font including a color separated component arranged in predetermined superposed relation in the plane of the transparent sheet for subsequent transfer of each selected character and its color component as a unit to a working drawing to be photographically reproduced and subsequently printed in more than one color.
This invention is distinctive over my above named copending application by eliminating the requirement of forming negative film strips and the use of a film strip printing apparatus.